Archiv für März 2010

I've decided to switch to Cygwin Emacs from NTEmacs lately. As I had previously seen that the Cygwin X server may refuse to work at times, I wasn't ready to deinstall NTEmacs altogether (the X problems were certainly caused by my lack of understanding, or lack of maintenance, or both. Cygwin X in general is said to run smoothly). I rather figured it should be possible to run both Emacsen in parallel, without duplicating all efforts which go into maintaining your hand-crafted .emacs file. So I tried to come up with a way to share my existing .emacs with both versions. The major problem is that NTEmacs requires quite a lot of tweaks to make it cooperate with Cygwin bash, which is a far superior shell compared to Windows "cmd", whereas Cygwin Emacs requires at least as many tweaks to make it cooperate with native Windows tools like web browser or proprietary Windows programs. This is how I solved the problem.

I may have mentioned previously that I'm using a Windows XP box as a Netware client at work. As I prefer the Unix way of doing things otherwise, I've been installing lots of Unix software on this box. The two main components are Cygwin, which is essentially a Unix-like environment including all essential GNU tools, and the native GNU Emacs port. The latter is built with MinGW, the "Minimalist GNU for Windows" tools. The native port has been around for years, I must have been using it for more than a decade now. However, Cygwin has also provided an Emacs port for a while. This one either runs in your terminal (like MinTTY), or as a GUI app if you use Cygwin's X server. A speed comparison made me think twice about my previous choice.